Rowmark

Rowmark

Rowmark traces back to 1987, when Fred Kremer, then CEO of Hancor Inc., saw growing demand for extruded sheet in the awards and engraving market and set up a pilot line inside the drainage-pipe manufacturer. In 1993 he bought the sales and marketing rights from Connecticut-based Rowland Incorporated. Four years later he purchased the division outright, incorporated Rowmark, and resigned from Hancor — only to die in a plane crash that December. The Kremer family and newly appointed president Duane Jebbett pressed forward, opening a dedicated Findlay facility in September 1998. The firm manufactures in-house across more than 25 product lines — laser engravables, rotary engravables, and print-receptive materials — and holds over 80,000 SKUs in inventory. It distributes through hundreds of regional and international channel partners rather than selling direct, serving a geographic footprint that spans North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. A European distribution warehouse was set up in the Netherlands in 1996. The company’s extrusion technology and custom-color capabilities underpin its hold on the signage, recognition, and promotional-item supply chain. Rowmark moved through multiple financial sponsors after the Kremer family and management sold to Clearview Capital Partners in 2007, then to Bertram Capital in 2013, and later to Windjammer Capital in 2018. Under Bertram, it opened a 90,000-square-foot headquarters and manufacturing plant in 2015. Long-time operating executive Eric Hausserman was named President in August 2019 and elevated to Corporate President in January 2024. CEO Al Kabus, who joined in December 2018, leads the current team. Family interest persisted across the sponsor cycles, preserving the original operational philosophy. Rowmark’s structural differentiator is its embedded operating-company architecture inside what began as single-family ownership: a manufacturer that retained family oversight while accepting successive private-equity partners to fund expansion. That setup left the Findlay production base intact and the brand independent, unlike many family-founded industrial firms that fully exit to consolidation.